Misery's Sonata Pathetique
by Yuzuriha
Summary: Sometimes in life, the misery of yourself doesn't let you remember that someone lost themselves to misery, just before you did. Goten Son remembers, too late, too jaded, and too miserable to be anything but the same. Here's your reality.


**Misery**  
_sonata pathetique_

  
  


She's yelling again, and I feel sick.

I sat up in bed, wondering if in fact, in twenty-six years, if I had ever recalled my mother to be a pleasant company. Lazily, I brushed my fingers through the straight black mess on my head, sticking every which way and out.

"Kaasaan...I'm trying to sleep!"

The consistently violent-tempered woman shot down the still hazy hall carrying bucket upon bucket of clothing fitting only Pan, I decided.

"Goten Son, it is ONE O'CLOCK in the afternoon!" She declared, frowning heavily at my rumpled day clothes that had not been removed the night before. My almost un-depressed mood shattered at the moment she sniffed the air, hiked up her dress in a snobbish manner, and shuffled off, leaving the usual impression that I was trash. That's my mother...

Grabbing a stray fuzzy blue blanket, I shifted it over my shoulders and still in a half-sleep trudged down the same hall to the dining room. I collided with one of those little decorative tables designed to kill people when they weren't looking. A hand made vase and a picture frame dashed to the floor, the vase falling to its doom to the hard wood below, the frame wounded and cracked. I scowled at it.

It was a picture of Gohan, Videl, Pan, Kaasan, and _him_. Everyone in the Son family was present and smiling through the spider web cracks in the glass, except for myself. It figured that I was the only one willing to be unhappy.

I proceeded to kick the frame under that little table, telling myself that Kaasan would be around to pick up the broken glass pretty soon. I'd always hated pictures anyway.

  
  
  
  


Setting myself down at the table, I took a few bowls of oatmeal and slopped them down with quantities of brown sugar and milk. I really could eat forever; I really could. However, it just wasn't as fun this morning (or afternoon), so the forlorn and final bowl of oatmeal had to be contented with just being stirred and not eaten.

So I sat there, contemplating my one hundred and one ways to ruin Vegita's day list, when my ever cute, ever bouncy fourteen year old niece ran screaming into my one place of solitude in the entire day. As usual, she had some wonderful thing she and her girlfriends were doing this lovely Sunday. And as usual, I couldn't care any less.

"Goten-chan! Tousama gave me 30000 yen to spend today! Isn't that just outrageous?!" She giggled, and I frowned. 30000 yen was just being outright reckless with his earnings.

"Pan.. he gave you 30000 yen."

She nodded joyously.

"**Why** did he give you 30000 yen?"

She then did something she'd never done before. She lectured.

"I can't believe you! How am I going to tell all my friends that my uncle is such a...a..."

"Loser?" I offered.

"Right." She lifted an eyebrow, as if she couldn't conceive of a person that would want to beat on themselves. It's called depression, genki girl. Try it sometime.

I sighed. Might as well ask her what's going on, even though she might jump on me an beat my face in. Oh ho ho its the end of the world!

"Goten-chan, don't you know it's Trunksu-san's birthday?"

Blank.

Holy shit.

I forgot Trunks' birthday.

Pushing my bowl away from myself in disgust now that it's contents had congested itself into a pile of gray-ish slop, I had to confer with my board of directors. We decided, taking all measures into consideration, that I was a total asshole.

  
  
  
  


I decided to go for a walk after Pan bitched so much I couldn't stand to look at her little girl face shouting obscenities any longer. Her parties, boyfriends, and the color pink made me sick, and I suddenly wished I had left the fourth bowl alone.

It was better than getting stone dead drunk, I suppose.

"Goten! Get back in here and change those clothes! Your filthy!"

Briefly I remembered a fantasy about a few high school seniors I'd met just a few days before. They had been such voluptuous, dark haired girls..

"GOTEN!"

..losing socks..

"What the hell are you doing?!"

...caressing each other..

"Now, we are going to take these things to the cleaners in town. You had best be on your best behavior!"

Oh yes, I am filthy.

With a grin and a smile I spun on my heel and deftly threw on the only normal looking overcoat in the house --which was my trenchcoat-- and walked swiftly out the door, as if I had the entire escape freshly memorized. Which I did.

"Goten-chan! Get Trunksu-kun a present and send him my love!" Pan waved madly, her round face blurring with pink; same as the color of her new middle school prom dress. Ugh.

"Ok Pan! I will!" I exclaimed cheerfully, and hopped into my car. Greatfully, kaasan approved of this, as it appeared I was a simple, "normal" person just because I was driving like the average citizen. Hell, I just wanted to drive.

The trees above me clouded over the marginally quiet daylight, as I turned up some older but melancholy tune, and it blotted out any misfortunes I might cause myself willist I wallow in misery. I laugh as the sun tries unsuccessfully to get inside. Just for sheer spite, I put down the sunroof, daring that freaking yellow orb to just try it.

Look at me, I'm Goten Son! Isn't that grand?

Trunks and his secretary were having some fun on the table when I arrived, and blandly, my expression wasn't of surprise. He looked kind of embarrassed though, straightening his stupid tie in a business like manner as I shut the door and the tall blonde meekly ran back to her desk. He waved with a depressed look on his face.

"Hi, Goten.."

"Still paying your dates, Trunks?"

"Fuck off."

We walked in relative silence down the empty echoing halls of his mansion-like office building, the laughter and arguments of workers and techs bouncing off the walls and carrying down to us.

I turned my eyes over to the side of his beautiful face, clean and unscathed even from years of fighting and abuse. His slight grin in the face of his whole life being set for him. He smiled at the words, "preordained destiny", being the asshole that Trunks was.

I remember when I used to love him.

We were playing in his gravity room.. you know, the famous one were Trunks would push me down and pretend he wasn't going to help me up. He would grin at me, my legs feeling like sticks floundering in the breeze from the gravity, my arms aching from the effort of trying to hold my upper body, thinner than his by whole inches, up from the floor.

And suddenly he stopped smiling there above me. I thought for an instant that maybe he'd finally figured out how pitiful I was compared to someone like him, a little boy without a father to come down on him when he was being shy or giving a frightened surrender to his best friend in a fight, just like this one. Or surrendering to something or someone else entirely.

He stopped smiling and my elbows locked up, shivering. It was scary not to see his confident smirk so tall above me, but it was worse to have him bent before my shaking legs, picking me up from the torso and just quietly patting my hair in a hug. For a long time we half stood, with my head on his shoulder, not even knowing why we were allowed such contact. Never before had I been this close to Trunks, not since he'd turned thirteen the previous year.

He said to me, "I'm sorry.."

And it was the last I heard from the Trunks I had known before.

Every time I remember, I just fall in love with him again. Because I'm the only one who knows about that secret memory, and that secret part of Trunks that he dares share anyone with.. that heart that is long gone by now, thirteen years later.

"I'm sorry.." I say.

"It's alright. She's a bimbo, anyway." He says, and we walk off to have some drinks in the lobby. Driving away in shiny new cars and living it all up until we boys just die as men.

  
  
  


I keep on walking as I again feel sick.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Yes, a repost. I thought this old thing might need a second look. I hope you enjoy, and review. Goten wants of something nice.


End file.
